Dulce Et Decorum Est Critical Analysis

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Throughout history there has been tragedies. One of the greatest of all time is world war one or the great war. A war that pitted global super powers into one of history’s bloodiest and most gruesome wars. Nations fought with 19th century tactics with 20th century fire power creating devastating, gory, tragic war scenes. These sights not seen by the world until those very moments could only be described by the people living through them. Today, with hindsight, people view the war as an unnecessary flex of military might but that was not always the case. The war was actually very popular at the beginning and was considered almost a game. The world soon found out the deadly nature of humanity and the negative stigma that arrives from World …show more content…
New war machines devised to kill men in the most gruesome ways. Men ignorantly joined believing war was a light hearted affair with good intentions but in fact they were barbaric. War was no longer rows of men firing muskets that took a long time to load. War was in fact now a machines, a world of twisted metal gears grinding, mortars that splintered men and made them into earth, and toxic gas that fell to the bottom of melting lungs, machine guns that ripped apart ignorance. In “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen the readers see the truth behind the war. It is no longer glorification but pure fear, anxiety and atrocity. Wilfred Owen was a soldier in world war 1 and brings his own situations to the table when he depicts the scene of a comrade dying. In the scene “And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,/ His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;/ If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/ Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs” (Dulce et Decorum Est). The scene is no longer about a man boasting pride and a new uniform anymore. This is a much darker story of a men suffocating on his own blood. War was no longer a gentlemen’s “game” like it was in the centuries before it. Men died in gruesome ways and brought forth new problems like PTSD, known as shell shock in world war I. The men learned fast that war was not a lovely affair as they went over the top bayonets charging locking eyes with their enemy where whom life would be taken first was only a split second away. Or maybe the were to die not knowing whom shot them, and the families ignorantly continued life not knowing their son, husband or father died. Wilfred Owen finishes his poem off with the ironic story that he fell into, much like the story Jessie pope was depicting. Owen says “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/ To children ardent for some desperate glory,/ The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/

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